March 27, 2025
By Bob Glaves | CBF Executive Director
For most of us, tax time is just around the corner, everyone’s favorite time of year. As I’m getting ready to start my taxes using TurboTax again this year (being fortunate to have relatively simple tax circumstances), I thought it would be a good time to revisit my post from five years ago comparing innovation in the tax and accounting profession to the legal profession.
The case for what we can learn from the tax side has only gotten stronger since then, with a continuum of vetted options for tax assistance available to the public that ranges from online self-help like TurboTax to expert tax professionals. And believe it or not, the way the IRS vets and communicates these options to the public offers some great food for thought for our legal profession that could significantly improve access to justice for people in need.
Wait, the IRS as a Model? No Way!
Way. Really!
When someone is looking for help with preparing their taxes, or just has questions about how to file them, the IRS has an easy-to-follow webpage that lays out what you need to do and includes a vetted and approved continuum of resources and assistance options.
For people who are interested and able to do their taxes on their own, the site includes a variety of vetted and free self-help options people can use, including guided tax-preparation software options for those who qualify. For people like me who don’t meet the criteria for the free options, using your choice of tax-preparation software (like TurboTax) is offered as another option.
For people who need more help from a tax professional, the website includes links to certified free assistance options for people who qualify, as well as a comprehensive directory of IRS-approved tax professionals.
In a nutshell, if you don’t know where to get started or how to find appropriate resources and professionals to assist you, you or someone helping you can just go to this webpage, and it is all right there in one place.
The contrast with finding appropriate legal assistance
While there are a number of helpful sources for finding reliable legal information and assistance—Illinois Legal Aid Online, Illinois Court Help, CARPLS, and vetted bar association lawyer referral programs are a few prominent examples—there is no one site like the IRS webpage that includes a comprehensive suite of vetted, free and market-based options for people to find legal resources and assistance.
That “missing link” has real consequences for access to justice. When people recognize they have a legal problem, the first challenge they face is knowing where to go to find the right level of legal help for their circumstances. If they qualify for help from one of the many outstanding but generally overstretched pro bono and legal aid organizations that serve our community, they often do not know where or how they should get started.
That problem gets worse for the people who make too much to qualify for that already overstretched free legal help, or can’t get that help due to capacity constraints, but have trouble affording legal help in the traditional legal market.
Increasing the availability of free and affordable legal assistance is of course a key part to solving this problem, but that only solves one part of the problem in the market. There is still no one place like the IRS site to find the available legal help options and the technology-based resources that may be appropriate self-help solutions.
We already know that growing numbers of people are interested in and already are using technology-based options to help them resolve their legal issues. But there still is no way for people to know when those options may be appropriate for their circumstances or whether particular products in the private market are reliable legal resources.
Getting from here to there
As I wrote a few years ago, getting to a place where we could have something similar to the IRS site for people seeking legal help is not simply a matter of creating the website and adding the right links. It requires a modernized regulatory approach that responsibly integrates these technology-based solutions into the larger legal services delivery system, and it’s not rocket science.
Specifically, we need to develop a regulatory structure that allows entities offering technology-based legal solutions to do so in a way that consumers, lawyers, and courts can know has been responsibly vetted. By creating a path for entities to voluntarily become certified to offer these technology-based services in a way where they are vetted for legal accuracy and other protections, we can encourage responsible entities to offer these solutions and give legal consumers the ability to know these are legitimate tools they can use.
We also need to modernize the ethics rules so that lawyers can more realistically and responsibly collaborate with these companies to offer these technology-based solutions that consumers clearly want as part of a continuum of legal services for their clients.
As AI continues to advance, these tools are going to become an even bigger part of the market for legal services. The only question is whether we want that to occur in a regulated setting that responsibly incorporates lawyers as part of the solution or whether we want to let that part of the market continue to develop in a disjointed and largely unregulated fashion.
It is up to us to decide as a profession, and ironic as it may seem, the IRS is showing us the way towards better serving the public.